


Sleep

by teyla



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Character Study, Ficlet Collection, Gen, Originally Posted on LiveJournal, Time Lord Angst, Time War Angst, time sense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-07
Updated: 2017-01-07
Packaged: 2018-09-15 09:35:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9228971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teyla/pseuds/teyla
Summary: Two ficlets about the Doctor's relationship to sleep.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on [LJ in 2008](http://t-eyla.livejournal.com/239347.html), beta'ed by euclase, reposted here with minor edits.

Silence

When the Doctor opens his eyes, he doesn't know what woke him. His surroundings are dark, but he knows where he is. The place feels and smells perfectly familiar; it's his bedroom in the TARDIS.

Everything is absolutely silent.

He reaches out with his mind, carefully, and finds that the TARDIS has withdrawn and shut herself down. She does it about as often as he sleeps, which is to say almost never, but Time has been slow lately. Things have adjusted to a calm equilibrium that fills the Vortex with a quiet that the Doctor hasn't experienced for some time. Not since the War, anyway.

He used to welcome it. The feeling of a calm Vortex is similar to the quiet, all-embracing silence you experience when you step outside after a heavy overnight snowfall - all sounds muted, all things covered in a white blanket, giving unity to diversity. And it's still like that; the calm, the quiet, it hasn't changed. What has changed, though, is what the Doctor can hear in the silence of the still Vortex. Or rather, what he can't hear.

All Time Lords are connected to the Vortex, and the Vortex sits at the center of everything. This means that every Time Lord leaves an echo, white noise that is picked up by all the others. These echoes are not something a Time Lord would experience consciously; like the feeling of the two hearts beating in his chest, they are simply something that had always been there for the Doctor.

In the wake of the destruction of Gallifrey, the Vortex had churned, and Time had been changing, flexing and readjusting. With so much noise, so much static, even the absence of the Time Lords wasn't as noticeable. Bit by bit, though, the Doctor has managed to find if not peace, then at least some sort of equilibrium in his thoughts. The Vortex took quite some time to balance out as well, but it seems that it finally has.

Everything is calm now, and the Doctor finds that the silence is deafening.

He reaches out again, not as careful this time. The TARDIS is startled into wakefulness, her engines powering up, her presence filling the Doctor's mind, alert and questioning. The Doctor pushes the covers aside and gets out of bed.

_Come on_ , he tells her. _Time to run._

~*~*~*~*~

Hidden

_When he finally snaps, it's not genocide that does it. It's not planets bursting apart and suns exploding._

It's a kid dying. A child loses her life, and the Doctor loses his mind.

Mankind is the first to be punished. No more pointless killing, no more wars, no more petty vendettas. Just hungry flames, covering planet Earth, purifying. When nothing is left of Sol 3 aside from a black, burned-out wreck, the Doctor moves on.

The Sontarans are next, each and every one of them. The Doctor has to respect their determination; even the last clone dies with a smile on his lips.

He doesn't kill the Daleks, the few that are still left. All he does is find out where they are going and make sure to get there first. Finding one planet after another lifeless and destroyed, the Daleks lose their purpose for existing and start eliminating each other. The Doctor waits and watches until there's only one left before he uses a scavenged Dalek ray gun to exterminate it. Nothing he's ever done in his whole life has felt better than this.

He saves the Master for last.

The Master is so gleeful when they meet, thinking that the time has finally come for the two remaining Time Lords to rule over the universe. The Doctor is only too happy to rectify that assumption. With all the new regenerations that the Time Lords gave him, it takes the Master a long time to die. It's not pretty, and by the end, the Doctor has lost all respect for him.

He leaves the Master's body to rot on a nameless planet and steps into his TARDIS. He may have turned this universe into a barren wasteland, but after all, there are more universes than this.

~*~

When the Doctor wakes up, the sheets are damp and clinging to his body. He's gasping for breath, his hearts are racing, and he can't get out of bed quickly enough.

He tends to forget it, but there is, in fact, a reason he sleeps as little as possible. For once, the Doctor's glad he's not human. He doesn't know how they stand it, doing this night after night.

He'd go mad.


End file.
